Visual art, in general, makes no noise. Film, awash in music, speech and sound effects, is suffused with it.

A new show at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive explores the aesthetic, emotional, psychological and spiritual terrain that underlies those expectations and assumptions. Ranging from hushed Surrealist canvases by Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte to experimental silent films to a Robert Morris minimalist wooden box that murmurs the recorded sounds of its own creation, "Silence" spans a century's worth of work that challenges, cajoles and charms visitors into re-examining the complex sonic space and the increasingly rare silence they share in a hyper-wired and amplified world. First mounted by Houston's Menil Collection and supplemented by new works here, the show opens in Berkeley on Wednesday.

Andy Warhol's ghostly images of electric chairs conjure an ultimate mortal stillness. Robert Rauschenberg's austere "White Painting" raises what the artist called "the suspense, excitement, and body of an organic silence, the restriction and freedom of absence, the plastic fullness of nothing." The flickering images and intuitive visual logic of Stan Brakhage's 1972 silent film "The Riddle of the Lumen" lure an audience away from the safe shoreline of narrative into the currents of free-association and the unconscious. Mainstream audiences entranced by last year's (mostly) silent Oscar-winning film "The Artist" may be open to new aspects, both lustrous and ascetic, of films that hold their tongue.

Lucinda Barnes, BAM's chief curator and director of programs and collections, said working on the "Silence" show heightened her own sensory apparatus. Magritte's paintings, she said, "make you feel the sound has been sucked out of the room."

An imposing Doris Salcedo sculpture "demands open space around it," offset at BAM by an eerie photocopy work by Amalia Pica in a way that seems to address "ineffable sorts of matters." Barnes continued, "The context in which we're confronting these works forces you to zero in more closely on both the physicality of art" and open up "a totality that can come out of nothingness."

A number of pieces in the "Silence" show actually do make some noise. One of Barnes' installation challenges was to separate those pieces, including both video installations and sculptures, from each other.

The Pacific Film Archive programs include soundtracked films as well as silent ones. In director Pat Collins' audible "Silence," about a sound recordist in search of stillness in the wind-washed Irish landscape, one character observes, "Too much quietness can drive a fella mad." But by the end of this becalmed 84-minute feature, the protagonist's quest takes on an intimate, mysteriously compelling resonance.

John Cage's famous 1952 composition "4'33" "- during which the performer sits in silence in front of a piano keyboard for the proscribed time - was a touchstone and inspiration for the exhibition. As the Menil Collection's curator of modern and contemporary art Toby Kamps puts it in his catalog essay, that celebrated piece touches on the composer's interest in Zen Buddhism and also "stresses the limits of reason, awareness of the present moment, and, perhaps, the idea that emptiness can represent a form of transcendence."

"Silence" pays tribute to the Cage piece with printed scores, a film of a "4'33" " performer and his audience, and artist Steve Roden's document of a yearlong immersion in the work. For Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor, this avant-garde landmark invites deeper reflection and inquiry.

"Silence is a profoundly interesting question about the human mind and physiology," said Keltner, who will have a show-opening conversation with Menil curator Kamps on Wednesday at noon.

In research on nonverbal communication and emotions, Keltner and others have conducted studies on the neuroscience of silence. Studies suggest that in states of quietness, the amygdala and frontal lobes strike a balance, "freeing up the mind to an expanded state. We know that when we are mindful and nonjudgmental," said Keltner, "that noisy voice of self-criticism quiets."

At the same time, he added, "it turns out there is really no quietude in the brain. Even when we're not doing something, the associative networks of the brain are very active." Keltner has looked beyond the brain to the vagus nerve bundle and even the digestive system and how those bodily structures participate in meditative states. In the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, researchers are investigating the potentially different brain responses to beauty in nature, fiction or dance.

Silence, it seems, is a growth industry, in museum galleries and movie theaters as well as research labs. While it may be paradoxical or even counterproductive to talk too much about what happens when we stop talking and listening and look more closely and expansively, the art and ideas in "Silence" can't help but get the mind whirring away to itself.